Designing for Reuse
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Nickel magazine, June 2003 -- If only it were possible to design patterns of
material use in society (and here, I'm speaking of the inorganic variety) to mimic the cyclical patterns we
see in nature. Economic activities would become closed loops; no materials would exit from these loops back
into the natural environment from whence they came. These goals are laudable. But are they achievable?
We all know that reusing and recycling materials conserves natural resources, energy and the capacity of the natural environment to assimilate wastes. Nevertheless, the volume of nickel-containing materials that is available at the end of life for reuse and recycling is too small to eliminate the need for newly-mined nickel. Demand for nickel is growing at about 5% per year -- too much to be supplied by recycling alone.
Fortunately, very little nickel actually goes to landfill. In the European Union, almost all process scrap and more than 80% of end-of-life nickel-containing products are collected and reused by industry (see accompanying diagram at left). It is recycled mostly in the form of alloys. About half the nickel content of a stainless steel cooking pan, for example, will have come from recycled sources.
People who reuse and recycle nickel-containing materials are motivated by the high value of these products at the end of their lives. Nickel is worth too much for people to knowingly throw it away. The market price of nickel fluctuates but is about six times greater than that of aluminum and more than thirty times greater than that of carbon steel. Recyclers and industrial users recognize this value.
The collection, sorting and reuse of nickel-containing stainless steel is a sophisticated, growing industry in every country where nickel is used. In 2000, more than 290,000 tonnes of nickel were reused in the EU in the form of stainless steel scrap. As the average nickel content of the scrap was about 10%, that means the EU scrap industry handled about 3 million tonnes of nickel-containing stainless steel scrap that year.
One way to increase recovery rates would be to make it easier for consumers to return products for recycling. Mobile phones, for example, may represent a small portion of total waste in the electronics sector, yet their recyclability benefits almost everyone in the developed world -- and significant amounts of nickel can be recycled from them. In 2002, one company in the U.K., Shields Environmental, recycled a million nickel-containing batteries from mobile phones: 54% of them were nickel-metal hydride batteries, 30% were lithium-ion batteries, and 16% were of the nickel-cadmium type (read story, here >>).
But leaving electronics aside, most nickel-containing products remain in use for an extended period of time. Since they are durable and have a long service life, nickel-containing products often provide the best solutions to today's environmental challenges. Durable products may be somewhat more costly to manufacture, but the payoff comes when they are used for many cycles with little further input. We report on a company that is reaping these benefits by refurbishing stainless steel beer kegs -- a product in which nickel plays an important part (read story, here >> ).
Although closed material loops appear, at present, to be unattainable, the use and reuse of nickel can
continue indefinitely. Nickel produced and put into use today should, therefore, be considered to be a
resource for future generations.
pwhiteway@nidi.org
Editor
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